In recent years the market has adapted to the usefulness of cloud computing for the server (backend) and the desktop (frontend, de-velopment, end-user experience) computing. Cloud computing has a strong potential also for mobile computing. Today the gap between mobile computing and desktop computing in terms of usage, usefulness and security threats is very narrow. Mobile computing terminals (like smartphones or tablets) are used every day by millions of people for work, study and for entertain-ment purposes.
Current generation mobile devices are powerful enough to run complex applications, even though they are small and lightweight enough to be carried everyday anywhere in the pocket. Many smartphone owners use their devices for remote banking or as payment terminals, both for sending or receiving payments. Also many people use their mobile device for entertainment activities like, listening to the music, getting pictures or playing games.
Students use their tablets for reading textbooks and getting notes of classes; large and small busi-nesses distribute mobile devices to their employees. Each employee uses it differently, depending on his job function. For example, a carrier can use it to scan of the barcodes of the packages delivered. Many smartphone owners use their devices for remote banking or as payment terminals, both for sending or receiving payments. Also many people use their mobile device for entertainment activities like, listening to the music, getting pictures or playing games.
Based on above described usage scenarios by various categories of people under different usage contexts, there are many security threats while using mobile computing. Quite often a person uses the same de-vice for all the above described use cases, and hence the user runs various varieties of applications, whose category spans across work, study, entertainment. This introduces a big opportunity for malware that tries to steal business or personal information. Also since the mobile devices are small, expensive and powerful, they are stolen frequently. People quite often misplace or lose them. Losing a mobile device doesn't mean just losing an expensive object but the losing data stored in the device can hurt the person or company owns them. Also in general as popularity of mobile devices grows, users demand to run heavier applications on their mobile. As the trend indicates, us-age of desktop PCs decline, users want to run their desktop applications on their mobile devices with little or no modifications. These end user scenarios have requirements that are not possible using hardware resources available in mobile devices.
Cloud computing enables broad range of applications ranging from traditional office applications to 3D applications to the desktop. Even though mobile devices are increasingly becoming popular, they are not as powerful as desktop computers in terms of computing resources. Also end user demand to run heavier applications on mobile devices keeps increasing.